Pairing software would probably not be the oddest thing chess discussions groups have gone to war over.
TDs should know enough about pairing in general and the specific pairing program theyâre using to know what parameters to adjust or when to alter the pairings.
The best way to gain this knowledge is to run a bunch of mock tournaments and see how the program handles specific situations compared to hand pairing. (IMHO all TDs should know how to pair a section up to about 40 players. Iâve seen NTDs pair a 200+ player section by hand with ease, but thatâs not something Iâd expect most TDs to be able to do.)
Hi Mike, 200+ player sections are tedious but usually not too difficult. I found it easier to hand-pair a 450 player 7 round section in 1988 that to hand-pair a 50 player 7 round section in 1985 with 25 of the 50 players being from the same school and needing to have their pairings against teammates minimized (none of those 25 played a teammate more than twice in the seven rounds and all of the pairings still made sense - but it was not easy to do).
Nowadays so many TDs are pairing program dependent that they would have difficulty doing hand pairings for even 30 players.
Chess Manager costs $97 and Iâve spoken with people who said it doesnât really work well for US Chess rules. The person I spoke with had to manually copy over the ratings report into the US Chess interface (rip). Our club uses Chess Nut and it has been working really well for us. It supports Swiss, Round Robin, Double Round Robin, Teams, Tiebreakers, etc. It creates the 3 DBF files needed and is completely free. It is web based so youâd need an internet connection at the place youâd be running tournaments. It should definitely save you some money though.
I mad an account, and it does look pretty nice, but I noticed there is a page/part of the dashboards that talks about orders in an invoice like fashion. Is it forever free, or certain features free?
It does look impressive, but not sure about requiring internet everywhere I go. Here in Alaska, some places even cell phones donât work. But, it might be handy for places where it does work.
Our club has some talented software engineers who created it as a passion project when we couldnât find a good pairing software that worked for Macs. We are currently in the middle of this tournament so you can even get a flavor for how it pairs: https://chessnut.club/e/mayhem-swiss/section/156
I do think they plan to charge for some of the optional community building features eventually (things like sending messages to club users, managing members/dues, creating a public facing club page). I believe the pairing will be forever free (with all pairing features included)
Oh also the orders arenât for payments to chess nut. Orders are when you register for a tournament. So if you registered for our upcoming quad (which is free) it would show up there
I might also add that I have used Vega chess for two tournaments, and two quads, so swiss and round robin events, as well as one two section event. It has worked for all of them*.
*Though multi section requires you to open the app once for each section, then combines them in the rating report at the end.
It allows you to download the golden database text file and will fill in players data, such as rating and name, if you add someone by ID#.
It also integrates seamlessly with my printer, so I can post results and round pairings. And, if you have the internet, you can connect to vegachess online and people can view the rounds or results or pairing on their phones.
Though it did present a slight issue in the program, which only accepts M/F genders, to which one player, who did not show up, but was going to, is listed as non-binary, ends up being male in the program. But the tournament players do not see that screen, so only I as the TD would know, hense not offending the party involved, should they play in a future event.
Itâs not a direct answer, but it should be relatively easy to run a small Windows Virtual Machine on you Linux laptop using VirtualBox, or some other free hypervisor.
So I was testing out chessnut.club and it looks pretty neat, but I found a few problems that either I donât know how to properly do on chessnut, or chessnut has not implemented yet:
a. You canât mark a forfeit for any game between two players. E.g., Forfeit for failure to appear, etc. In chessnut has to be marked as a win/loss/draw. But technically a Forfeit can be un-played, so you canât assign a win or loss for rating purposes, or the ratings will be adjusted when a game was not played, right? This happened during my first tournament as TD.
b. Once you pair the players, how do you print a pairing chart to pin on the wall? I guess you could use a projector or big screen tv to display the pairing for the round, but at the last two events I did (a scholastic event with two sections, and a blitz tournament) did not have a TV/projector in the room, so I just printed the pairing chart and players could go to those boards. I suppose you could just print the web interface page, but usually you use a wall chart that has information other than just their names and board number.
It does let you download/print the results and standings, which is nice.
Per these screenshots, it appears to say Player 7 is in second place. Of course players 7,8,12, and 15 all have a score of 3.5, which is a four way tie for second place, but per the tie breaks, based on Modified Median it should be in the order of players 12, 8, 7, 15, correct? But instead it orders them by pre event rating within their score group. Or am I using it wrong?
I am not trying to be critical, but these things seem like they would make tournament directing difficult. The web interface looks nice, though.
Hi! so we havenât had to mark too many forfeits at our club but the way we weâve done it is to delete the pairing and then assign each player a custom result i.e. either a forfeit win/draw/loss
I believe you are right about the standings and I know that is something being worked on. I think they are adding some other tiebreaks and giving people the ability to specify a custom tiebreak order before having it sort the standings. But i do know that is supposed to be coming soon
Cool, just me not knowing how to use the program then! It would be simpler if it was just a selected result in the normal list of results. But perhaps it is not that common?
Either way, not trying to nit-pic, just wasnât sure I could use it with my current understanding. Looks nice though.
Say that example I gave above is a tournament with $200 first place, $100 second place, and $50 third place prizes.
The sole winner gets the $200. Thats easy.
With four people tied for 2nd, do you add 2nd and 3rd prizes and divide by 4? So $100+$50=$150. $150/4=$37.50 each?
Or do the four tied for 2nd split the $100, and the lucky sixth place guy gets the $50?
I am thinking it is the first, not the second method. Forgive my ignorance, I am pretty new at this.
For the scholastic tournament I did, we used tie breaks because the prizes were physical objects. For the Blitz tournament that had cash prizes, I had info for people prior to registering which tiebreaks would be used, so we didnât have to split prizes, because it was such a small ammount of cash.
